Adam Francisco (who has a Ph.D. in Islamic-Christian relations from Oxford University) is professor of history at Concordia University in Irvine, California.

His work on the history of Islam is nuanced and informed. As one online bio notes, “He has a unique ability to see and understand both the difficulties facing Christians who wish to evangelize their Muslim friends and the Muslims who are being asked to come to Christ. Many of his unique insights come from personal experiences sharing his faith with Muslims.”

To get a taste, see the first couple of videos produced by Modern Reformation below, which provide some brief historical background.

If that whets your appetite, you can view four lectures he gave at Faith Lutheran Church in Capistrano Beach, California, on

Wow, this is a totally great article by liberal NYT writer Nicholas Kristof.

I share apprehensions about President-elect Trump, but I also fear the reaction was evidence of how insular universities have become. When students inhabit liberal bubbles, they’re not learning much about their own country. To be fully educated, students should encounter not only Plato, but also Republicans.

We liberals are adept at pointing out the hypocrisies of Trump, but we should also address our own hypocrisy in terrain we govern, such as most universities: Too often, we embrace diversity of all kinds except for ideological. Repeated studies have found that about 10 percent of professors in the social sciences or the humanities are Republicans.

We champion tolerance, except for conservatives and evangelical Christians. We want to be inclusive of people who don’t look like us — so long as they think like us.

Luke Barnes in his paper, “The Fine-Tuning of the Universe for Intelligent Life”:

Let’s be clear on the task that Stenger has set for himself. There are a great many scientists, of varying religious persuasions, who accept that the universe is ﬁne-tuned for life, e.g. Barrow, Carr, Carter, Davies, Dawkins, Deutsch, Ellis, Greene, Guth, Harrison, Hawking, Linde, Page, Penrose, Polkinghorne, Rees, Sandage, Smolin, Susskind, Tegmark, Tipler, Vilenkin, Weinberg, Wheeler, Wilczek. They diﬀer, of course, on what conclusion we should draw from this fact. Stenger, on the other hand, claims that the universe is not ﬁne-tuned.

Champions of rational, evidence-based thinking are seething after a public rebuke at one of their own conferences. Speaking on 15 May at the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism in New York, science journalist John Horgan said that sceptics — researchers and other people who promote the scientific method — spend too much time debunking ‘soft’ targets such as homeopathy when they should be going after tougher, ‘hard’ issues, such as whether regular mammograms save lives. Whereas some attendees welcomed the message, conference co-organizer Steven Novella, a neurologist at Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, took to his NeuroLogica blog to argue that sceptics have been grappling with both hard and soft targets for years: “We are already miles past the superficial framing that Horgan gives.”